Now that Erika’s team site has been configured, she has gotten some great feedback from the team and is ready to move forward with a few more customizations. A few team members have provided feedback that it would be great if they only had to go to one location to access all the content they need when working on the project. Based on the feedback, Erika worked with the IT department and determined that she could
proceed with using some of the new business intelligence features in SharePoint 2010 to accomplish her goals. Specifically, she wants to be able to display some supplier
information from an external system within the team site,display some Excel Services information directly on the team site and use the PerformancePoint dashboards to help her make business decisions based upon performance metrics and trends. Throughout the remainder of this walkthrough, we will walk through the process of completing these tasks.
Excel Services
Erika is going to create some Excel Services web parts to display some of the project data directly on the new site she created.
1. Click the Shared Documents link in the Left Navigation.
3. The document will open in the browser using Excel Services. Click the Open in Excel button toward the top of the screen.
4. On the Open Document dialog, select the Edit option and click OK. The file will open in Excel 2010.
5. Scroll to the right and select cells L4:M30 (see screenshot).
6. In the Ribbon, click the Insert tab. Click the Pie dropdown and select a 2-D Pie chart type. A pie chart will be inserted into the document. Position and stretch this chart to fill the blank space to the left of the data table.
7. Click on the Save button in the Quick Access toolbar (above the File tab) to save the file back to the SharePoint library.
8. Close Excel and return to the browser, which should still be displaying the Gears Sales History workbook in Excel Services. Click File > Reload Workbook. Click Yes on the dialog asking if you want to perform this action.
9. The workbook is refreshed and the newly-modified chart is now displayed in Excel Services.
Visio Services
Next, Erika would like to make some updates to a SharePoint list, which is actually a connection to supplier’s data which is stored in a SQL database. Since this information is important to the project, Erika asked her IT administrator to create the connection for her. Now, the project team only needs to visit one location in order to view or update the supplier data.
1. Navigate back to the home page of the site.
2. Click the Supplier Information link in the left navigation. The data appears just like any other SharePoint list, however, it is dynamically connected to the Suppliers table in the SupplyChainSQL database, which is not actually a SharePoint database.
3. Click the dropdown menu for item 10 in the ID column. Select Edit Item.
5. The value is now changed in the list. Note that this has also changed the value for this item in the Suppliers table in the SupplyChainSQL database.
6. In the left navigation, click Shared Documents.
7. Click the dropdown around SupplyChain_v3.vdw Visio document and select Edit in Microsoft Visio. Click OK on the Open Document dialog.
8. When prompted, click Enable Automatic Refresh. When Automatic Refresh is enabled, the data will automatically refresh every 3 minute (this interval is
configurable in the Data Refresh dialog). Click OK on the Microsoft Visio Security Notice dialog.
9. Zoom in on the graphic labeled Cover and Lube (just to the upper right of the center of the diagram). The new value you entered in SharePoint (25) is reflected in the Visio diagram, which is also dynamically connected to the SupplyChainSQL
database.
PerformancePoint Services
Next, Erika would like to take a look at a performance dashboards to view key performance metrics, trends and efficiencies that can help her with this project. PerformancePoint Services makes it possible for business users to see the information they need in an aggregated environment giving them the information they need to make informed business decisions.
1. Enter http://intranet.contoso.com/bi in the browser and press Enter to go to the Business Intelligence Center, an out of the box template that provides
information and samples of how to use the BI components in SharePoint. 2. Click on Dashboards in the Quick Launch and then again on the Adventure
3. Click on Summary. This loads the dashboard which displays a corporate
scorecard and strategy map outlining how we are performing and aligning to our corporate strategy.
4. Click on the first icon on the scorecard view (Filter by Status) and select Off target. You can quickly see what on or off target and where to focus your attention.
5. Click on Sales Detail Dashboard. This is an operational view of the business. There are a variety of items here that you can interact with to understand how we are performing, which are the top 5 products, and our most profitable products.
6. In the bottom chart (Gross Profit Margin). On the first bar, right click on the light blue bar and select remove. We know that mountain bikes are selling well, but also want to see other items that might be performing so we will remove
Mountain Bikes and find that Touring Bike are also moving. Right click again on the blue bar (now for Touring bikes) and select decomposition tree. This allows us to view the data in a unique way by decomposing the data and enabling you to slice and dice the data across any dimension of the business.
7. From the top product item, click on the item (835K Touring-1000) and then click on Sales Channel.
8. Click on Sales Channel and then select Sales Territory and then Country. We are looking at touring bikes sold through our various channels for particular countries.
9. Now select the + sign next to one of the items (i.e. 297K United States - if you don't see the + sign, select the item (click) and it will appear to the left of the item). You are now drilling into the country down to each region for the highlighted item.
10. Now that you have this path, you can do exactly the same for another product item. Select the next product down by clicking the + sign (again, click on the item and then select the plus sign).
This walkthrough provided a tour of the new business intelligence capabilities in
graphical user interface, without the need to write code and rich dashboards provided her insight into business data and allowed her to find identify trends to make informed decisions. Erika was able to configure a site for her team that allows them to have a single point of access for all the data they need for their project.